How He Grew His Coffee Shop to $45 Million in Revenue

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Key Takeaways

- Gregorys Coffee has grown from one small Park Avenue bar in 2006 to 53 locations nationwide, with typical stores now doing over $1 million in annual sales.

- Revenue reached about $40 million last year and is projected to hit roughly $45 million this year.

- Gregorys Coffee founder and CEO Gregory Zamfotis attributes the growth to quality coffee, roasted in-house.

Two decades ago, Gregory Zamfotis was at a crossroads. He was a second-year law student at Brooklyn Law School and had just been offered a full-time position at a real estate law firm. The only problem was that Zamfotis wanted to open his own business.

“I grew up in the food business,” he explains in a new interview with Entrepreneur. “My father operated a number of concepts in New York City, so I grew up working with him.”

Zamfotis worked at his father’s sandwich shop during his time in law school. By the end of his education, he was effectively running the place. He wound up “really enjoying” the work and considering it as a potential career. He knew he wanted to start a business of his own one day, separate from his father’s endeavors. So after graduating from law school, he took his interest and passion for coffee and his experience working in food service, and decided to open his own coffee shop. He was 24 years old.

“If you were in the Midtown Financial District, the areas where the majority of New Yorkers are spending their time working, the only options for coffee really were Starbucks or Dunkin,” Zamfotis says. “I thought that was a huge opportunity because I grew up working there. I wanted to take what I had learned, apply it to the coffee industry, and do it in a part of the city that was extremely underserved at the time.”

Gregory Zamfotis. Credit: Gregorys Coffee

Zamfotis started by opening one coffee bar on Park Avenue and decided it would simply be better than anything around it. The plan was to obsess over the drinks, the ingredients and the feel of the place until it earned a permanent slot in New Yorkers’ daily routines.

Day after day, cup after cup, that little shop turned into a magnet for regulars who didn’t just like the coffee; they were loyal to the brand. The identity sharpened around bold, playful branding and a menu that refused to cut corners.

“We wanted to do a quality specialty coffee operation in a volume setting,” Zamfotis says, describing early days when he put in “70 to 80 hours a week” at the store to make sure it ran exactly as he envisioned.

What surprised him

What Zamfotis didn’t fully understand at the time was how hard it would be to do coffee exceptionally well at scale. “I guess I was surprised at just how complex doing coffee really well was,” he says. “The only way we were gonna win is if we could differentiate ourselves from the national players or the other people doing coffee around the block.”

That realization pushed him into a kind of self-imposed coffee bootcamp. He visited shops, attended conferences and immersed himself in the craft. “I had to spend a lot of time and energy not only visiting other coffee shops, traveling, going to conferences, listening to speakers, and just pouring myself literally into all things coffee, to make myself an expert,” he says.

That work changed the culture and the product. “There’s a difference between doing things well and doing things great,” he explains. As he elevated the coffee program and training standards, customers began noticing the difference — and kept their daily habit. “Customers, maybe in the beginning, were coming because of all the other things…great service, fast, good-looking store…then once I started to elevate the coffee program higher and higher, while also keeping all those other elements so strong, that’s when we really started to make things better,” he says.

Today, Gregorys roasts its own beans in Long Island City, bakes fresh pastries and emphasizes personalization — from milk choices to syrup levels — while still moving fast. The goal, Zamfotis says, is that customers should feel like they’re sacrificing nothing: not time, not quality, not options.

Credit: Gregorys Coffee

Scaling from one store to 53 — and to $45 million

Zamfotis estimates the first shop took 12 to 18 months to find consistency; the company hit the $1 million annual sales mark around year two or three. That traction gave him the confidence to open a second location roughly two and a half years after the first — and it was an instant hit.

“When the first location may have taken 12 to 18 months to stabilize, the second location was stable from the get-go…very busy from the day we opened,” he says.

From there, growth became a function of systems and people. “I’ve always said you can only grow as fast as the people [you have] to help execute,” Zamfotis says. For about 12 years, every single person in a position of authority at Gregorys was promoted from within, often starting as baristas.

That philosophy helped the c